Wednesday, 3 December 2014

Published by Jimmy Simond on Wednesday, 3 December 2014 |&nbsp1 comment

After testing
for a number of months, Google has finally officially launched the
mobile-friendly label in mobile search results. Gone are those good old days
when people used to use laptops and other mobile devices. Now is the time when
everyone owns a smart phone and they use it full-fledgedly to access the
internet and search anything under the sun. The shift of trend among the
internet users has also forced the SEOs to change the way they formulate their
strategy. Instead of only concentrating on search results on computer and
desktops, now they also have to make sure that everything is perfect with the
mobile users.

In an effort to
assist the mobile searchers in knowing which sites they might click on are
mobile-friendly versus which ones are not, Google has added a text label under
each URL in the snippet that reads “Mobile-friendly” as the initial part of the
search result’s snippet. According to Google, it can be indeed frustrating for
a mobile searcher to land up on a web page that is not at all mobile-friendly
and this is why they’re adding the label to their mobile search results to
communicate this to the searcher.

Apart from the
mobile-friendly label, Google is also busy in experimenting with a new ranking
algorithm for all the mobile-friendly websites. But the rising question is how
you can qualify to show such a label for your particular web page? Google says
that this will depend on whether or not GoogleBot detects the following
criteria:

Averts
software that is not common on any mobile devices like Flash

Sizes
content to the screen so that the users don’t have to scroll horizontally or
even zoom in the page

Uses
text that is comprehensive without even zooming

Places
links that are far enough apart so that the right one can be easily located

How does Google know
how a user can experience your mobile website?

Well, this is
yet another viable question that is being raised in the minds of the SEO
analysts and the practitioners. Google has always been dropping various kinds
of hints that say that they understand mobile experience better for some time
now. They even recently launched mobile usability reports in order to help the
webmasters find issues with their mobile sites.

Google also recommends all its users to test
their site in the new Mobile-Friendly test tool, review each and every
mobile-friendly guidelines and use different third-party tools to go
mobile-friendly with their websites. This new mobile-friendly label in mobile
search results will soon roll out into the market within the next few weeks in
the month of November, 2014.